People Near Death From Traumatic Brain Injury May Still Revive: Study

Advanced imaging can detect covert consciousness, offering hope for seemingly hopeless cases, experts say.

Dmitriev Mikhail/Shutterstock

When doctors advised pulling the plug on a comatose 22-year-old after a car crash, his mother sought a lifeline from the Brain Rehabilitation and Injury Network (B.R.A.I.N). For weeks, the advocacy group’s founder, Sue Rueb, sat vigil with the unresponsive young man, reading to him for about two weeks.

“All we need, sir,” she said to one of the neurologists, “is time.”